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Essay By Steven Leibo

Do It Yourself Historical Fiction

Those of us who are committed to the importance of learning history often
site the many advantages gained from an understanding of the past -- issues
ranging from the enhanced research and writing skills studying history
offers to developing the more sophisticated perspective on ourselves necessary
to operate well in modern society. But most professional teachers also
realize that these "pay offs" from historical studies usually come only
after years of study when at last the sense of patterns and perspective
gained have had time to develop and mature.

The problem, of course, for the classroom teacher is that these clearly
recognizable advantages are almost never immediately available to the beginning
student or even explainable to the large numbers of young adults who inhabit
our general education-based history courses. For them, all too often, history
is simply a series of names and dates to memorize withl little relevance
either to the world they live in or their understanding of their future
needs.

Thus the primary task of any historian interested in truly engaging
their students is to find a way to make an era that is often dramatically
different from their own, compelling enough to arouse the learner to become
excited enough to want to learn more. For those engaged in teaching not
only about the past but the past of widely different cultures, far beyond
the borders of the United States or the world of the West, the task can
be especially daunting. For here we are often not even dealing with early
versions of ourselves but perhaps early versions of Modern Chinese or South
Asians, an even greater intellectual leap than study of American history
requires.

With these problems in mind some, though not all, historians have felt
compelled to find newer tools to involve the students on a more personal
and emotional level than that usually found in the impersonal generalizations
which dominate lectures and textbooks. But these efforts are often disdained
by our professional colleagues because many historians believe that any
format beyond the lecture, monograph, primary source and textbook approach
is somehow heretical.

I have heard historians denounce even the use of professionally produced
documentaries as somehow distracting from the real stuff of learning. I
personally retain a profound sense of irritated embarrassment from a comment
I once made within a very prestigious scholarly seminar, in front of yet,
one of the leading scholars of South Asia, that I had used the film Gandhi
in class and found it helpful . The look of scorn, the sense that I had
somehow claimed to have disrobed in class, remains deeply embedded in my
mind to this day. And this negative attitude toward historical recreations
is hardly uncommon. Only a few weeks ago the op-ed page of the New York
Times was filled with a particularly nasty attack on those who would
seek to use Steven Spielbergís Amistad to help students understand early
nineteenth century America. But these prejucides seem very distant from
the reality of my own professional career.

In my own case I have taught widely throughout the United States, from
the West Coast through the Midwest and more recently in New York Stateís
capital district area. My teaching experiences have ranged from large state
universities and small private colleges through several community colleges.
And despite the common prejudices of many professional colleagues , these
experiences have forced me to recognize that if the students don't care,
do not become engaged and emotionally involved in a subject they simply
will not do their best work or sometimes any work at all. No doubt the
situation is different at the nationís most elite colleges but in the world
I work in things are quite different. Either engage them or forget it.
It is with that in mind that I have always used novels alongside more conventional
tools to involve my students.

Over the years the novels I have used have ranged from Gore Vidal's
Julian and Awad's Death in Beruit to Emcheta's The Double
Yoke and Ba Jinís Family. In each case the novel was chosen
to try to make the students more emotionally involved in the historical
and cultural communities I have been trying, through my more formal classroom
methods, to introduce to them.

To try to bridge the gap between the goals of the novelist and the historical
issues I am concerned with I have for years insisted that the students
write an evaluation of each novel with regard to its utility as a complement
to more formal historical training. The general assignment is to compare
and contrast the novel's portrayal of the historical and cultural subject
under consideration with the other impressions gained by the students from
the more formal classroom materials, texts, readers, lectures, films etc.
My goal is to develop critical reading skills and to enhance their historical
perspectives. On the larger level the goal has always been to make what
was foreign more personal and familiar. On a more practical matter we all
know that for the bulk of our students their future encounters with "history"
will more likely occur within historical novels and films than with monographs
and they might as well get used to looking critically at these most common
tools of historical presentation and interpretation.

Using such novels has almost always helped to enrich my classes and
they have been well received by the many students I work with in a variety
of teaching setting. Nevertheless, there are some problems with this approach.
A primary drawback is the reality that even the best and most consiensious
historical novels are created to entertain. The teaching of history, even
for the most scholarly fiction writer, is at best a secondary concern.
My goal, however, in choosing such materials has always been precisely
the opposite. Thus even the best historical novels often fulfill less well
the informative goals I look for. After all, stopping to explain a cultural
phenomenon in the middle of a dramatic scene is hardly helpful in carrying
along a narrative.

It was with this weakness in mind and of course with the attraction
of taking on a new intellectual challenge that I set out during the late
1980s to create a historical novel specifically designed to introduce students
to Sino-Western relations during the nineteenth century. The choice of
topic and period was for me a no brainer. I had just finished a five year
period during which I first produced a dissertation and then two books,
Transferring Technology to China: Prosper Giquel and the Self-strengthening
Movement (Berkeley 1985) and the Journal of the Chinese Civil War
1894 which had left me deeply aware of the circumstances of Sino-Western
relations on the nineteenth century coast of China. The historical personage
I worked on, Prosper Giquel, was particularly interesting because Giquel's
life itself which I had chronicled from the perspective of an academic
was extraordinarily varied. He had served in the Anglo-Chinese Occupation
police during the Second Opium War, gone on to work in the famous Chinese
Maritime Customs Service, ran a Sino-Foreign military contingent along
with the famous Chinese Gordon during the Taiping struggle and then went
on to help found and direct the Foochow Dockyard and finally ended his
career directing Chinese educational missions to Europe.

For a time I considered trying to fictionalize Giquel's life. I certainly
knew enough about him but despite the drama of his career there were limitations.
A good story requires a romantic element and Giquel's personal story, his
emotional life, at least as much as I understood it, could not have been
more boring. And the greatest drama of mid-nineteenth China, the revolutionary
movement known as the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace led by the communalistic
orientated Heavenly King who fancied himself the little brother of Jesus
Christ had seen Giquel only outside its gates leading armies hoping to
destroy it. Giquel had never made it inside that fascinating community.
So, I finally decided to create a fictional character and to drop him into
the middle of the world I knew so well and let him and my future readers
find their own way.

On the question of readers I should mention that my target audience

was the "generic" eighteen year old college student who largely inhabited
my classes. As a practical matter that also created some problems later
since I had aimed at an audience that per the publishing world was neither
fish nor fowl, a book aimed at bit above the the young adult market but
not filled with enough sex and violence to fit the market for adults. But
that is an issue that came up later.

I invented a character, Jason Brandt, who would as our story unfolds
run away from the Hong Kong home of his father a New England missionary
in order to take part in the excitement of the developing 1858 Opium War.
The story follows the teenager, and over time the emerging young man through
his years serving in the Anglo-French occupation forces that held Canton
during the late 1850s through his journey to find the famed Nanking based
Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace and his eventual establishment of a career
for himself as a journalist in Shanghai a decade later. The story was designed
to complement my emphasis on Sino-Western relations and the lives of Chinese
young people. Knowing my audience would be young adults I created two other
important characters, a young member of the Chinese Scholar gentry class
who had disgraced himself in the Confucian Civil Service exams and a young
woman who had been cast off by her family for infertility. Both of these
characters were created to carry along the bookís sub themes of Confucian
culture and the experience of women in traditional China. Especially important
was that each of the storyís three main characters were growing into adulthood
throughout the novel - a devise I hoped would be help my students identify
with them..

I mapped out a novel that turned out to include 230 pages broken into
26 chapters. In a larger sense the book was divided into several subsections:
First the Canton section which covers the young manís departure from Hong
Kong and his work with the allied forces. It includes his developing friendship
with the young disgraced scholar and his first encounter with the traditions
of the infamous Taipings.

The next section introduces two new element to the novel. First the
introduction of the female character Black Jade who is used to tell the
story of the tensions and problems associatged with the lives of traditional
Chinese women and the beginnings of their quest to find the famed Heavenly
Kingdom of Great Peace.

Much of the middle section of the book deals with first the trip toward
Nanking and then their lives within the Taiping Kingdom. Here the lives
of our main characters diverge as each of them, no longer together, seek
to build a new life for themselves. For the two Chinese characters this
means building a life among the heretical Taipings and for Jason the beginnings
of an effort to establish a career for himself as a writer. The individual
stories of each character were carefully mapped out to teach about aspects
of life within the Taiping world.

The last third of the book turns on life along the coast of China as
Jason traveled to Shanghai and at last established himself within that
famous treaty port as a journalist for the most famous newspaper of the
era, the North China Herald. These chapters were of course designed
to teach about life in the treaty ports in the late 1860s but as well through
Jasonís continuing relationship with his Chinese friends to carry on the
story of the Taipings through the kingdomís ultimate collapse. Through
a combination of political and social experiences the lives of each of
them is demonstrated by developments within the story.

Having written the book I then set out to test it. The first version
was shown around to a large number of people a few of whom knew traditonal
China well and some of whom had no background. Their comments were invaluable
and in the end forced a change in the ending of the book. As it turned
out my obsession with historical accuracy had led me to kill off the bookís
heroine as a device to involve the students in the horrors of the famous
Tientsin Massacre of 1870. Historically it was a great idea but for my
readers too emotionally unsatisfactory to work as a conclusion for the
novel. I had after all worked hard to get people to appreciate these young
people and killing off one of the most important ones was not at all appreciated.
A rewrite was then required.

Once that was accomplished I discovering a local firm that served as
the printer for a large number of well known national publishers and arranged
to run off a professional looking copy of the novel to test it more widely.
Once that was done I used it in one of my classes though I shoudl admit
somewhat dishonestly since I did not tell the students I had written it.
For that first semester at least, I believe my deception worked. The student
evaluations did seem to appreciate the book and most importantly the formal
papers were, given my goals, the best I had ever read. Clearly the more
obviously pedagogical goals of the novelís author made it easier for the
students to deconstruct the book per the required assignment. Lessons learned
from these experiences where incorporated into another run of the book.

At this pont one might expect the story to turn to the search for a
commercial publisher but while I did make a few efforts this turned out
not to be the path I chose. Although I had been relatively successful working
directly with publishers on non-fiction academic works, knowing that the
market for fiction was quite different I set out to find an agent for the
book. That effort, carried out to a limited extent was not very successful.
The general issue seemed to be that the chosen audience - eighteen year
olds created problems. I had created a book that was not quite young adult
- not quite adult and none of my efforts to find agents worked out.

But historians study change and we are living through a communications
revolution which I found much more interesting than sending packages of
manuscrpts out all the time. What I understood was that modern computer
technology now allowed single individuals to produce professional-looking
books ts that would have taken an entire editorial department to produce
in earlier years. And new production technologies allowed for the production
of limited run books s at much more affordable prices than ever before.
So I decided to create a publishing company myself. I sought out a name
that had not been used. Surprisingly Silk Screen Press was available
and I applied for ISBN numbers from Books in Print.

By the early 1990s I thus had my own publishing company with its own
press run of the novel in both paperback and hard cover. Clearly having
a commercial press do the project would have been easier and certainly
more potentially lucrative, but I have always been more interested in learning
than earning and had by then become more interested in learning about the
world of publications than in making the book a commercial success. This
was after all the first time I had gotten to this new element in the world
of books. Neither of my earlier experiences, with Asian Press at Berkeley
and the University of Hawaii previously or my more recent work with Franklin-Watts
or Stryker -Post has let me explore the business side of the world of books
I so admire. In that context all this was an intellectual feast.

As a practical matter all this took place during the early 1990s. At
that early point the ongoing technology revolution had allowed an individual
author to create an attractively bound book at an inexpensive price that
would have been impossible in earlier years. Moreover, the fast growing
Internet distribution groups offered the possibly of lowl cost advertising.
But there was a major hitch. While technology had bridged the gap on the
production and list serves could be used to inexpensively spread the word
about new boos distribution was another matter.

Local distributors could be approached to carry the book and that was
done but what I learned at the time was that book publishers donít normally
buy from publishers. They purchase through intermediary book suppliers
who demand enormous percentages of the profits to carry and distribute
the products of publishers. Their commissions were so high that despite
the low production expenses involved I could not sell the books at a reasonable
rates vis a vis my own costs. In a sense I could produce the book and spread
the word about its existence but not distribute it in a cost effective
manner.

But then more recently the Web arrived and a new communication world
opened up even further. With the birth of on-line book sellers like Amazon.com,
which were willing to work directly with small publishers and sell through
their interactive web sites, the final steps may have been taken to end
the monopoly on publication of a few large publishers and book dealers
on the production of books.

Now these new technologies with their built- in ability to eliminate
many "middle men" can work for small publishing houses and do so in a profitable
fashion.I write of these issues not because I claim to have been a big
success with my effort at producing historical fiction directly for the
classroom but to say that the opportunities for doing so are enormously
more possible today than they once were. The publishing industry has been
in a crises for years and we all know that the needs of the industry for
huge sales has often gotten in the way of the production of more literary
or in my case specialized fictional efforts. But that world is gone and
it seems more and more possible for academics to try their own hand at
finding new ways to teach their subjects. And those works that result will
be judged for how well they fulfill the mandate under which they were conceived
not the needs of publishers for large mass audience books.